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UK privacy watchdog warns adtech the end of tracking is nigh



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It’s been well over two years since the UK’s data protection watchdog warned the behavioural advertising industry it’s wildly out of control.
The ICO hasn’t done anything to stop the systematic unlawfulness of the tracking and targeting industry abusing Internet users’ personal data to try to manipulate their attention — not in terms of actually enforcing the law against offenders and stopping what digital rights campaigners have described as the biggest data breach in history.
Indeed, it’s being sued over inaction against real-time-bidding’s misuse of personal data by complainants who filed a petition on the issue all the way back in September 2018.
But today the UK’s (outgoing) information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, published an opinion — in which she warns the industry that its old unlawful tricks simply won’t do in the future.
New methods of advertising must be compliant with a set of what she describes as “clear data protection standards” in order to safeguard people’s privacy online, she writes.

Among the data protection and privacy “expectations” Denham suggests she wants to see from the next wave of online ad technologi …

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